Timeless text

First you're skimming a newspaper to find out about ghost towns in Utah, and then you find yourself sucked into a story about a girl in Chicago seeing an orange horse with yellow eyes, a blue mane, gold teeth, black tongue and green tail and carrying a cleaver in its foot, which, of course, is shaped like a gorilla hand.

And, we're told, this horse is "absolutely not the scarlet one that haunted Evanston last February."

Happens all the time.

At least, it did for Chuck Flood, and it can for anyone else now, too. Flood, of Bainbridge Island, Wash., is among a growing number of people who have found interesting tidbits of time from newly digitized newspapers put online by the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library.

Twenty old Utah newspapers are part of the easily searched collection that soon will comprise nearly 136,000 pages of vintage news, features and advertising, mostly from rural weeklies before 1922.

For Flood, that horse story from the Sept. 17, 1915, edition of The Wasatch Wave is an example of the kind of oddball article he could stumble upon while fishing for info about ghost towns or mysterious airplane sightings in Utah.

"It's almost like eating peanuts," Flood said. "When I start looking around, even for a particular topic, I can't help but read the papers. It's just great reading about history and finding out about things. You start reading and, suddenly, there goes an hour."

For folks ready to sling themselves back in journalistic time, the Web site (accessible through www.lib.utah.edu/digital/unews or digitalnewspapers.org) serves as a desktop version of Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine.

What's more, it's free, and it allows users to either browse or search for names or phrases or words.

"This is what the real promise is of this process and this technology," said John Herbert, director of the digitized newspapers project. "Anyone with an interest in Utah history and an Internet connection can do a search across our site, on any topic they want. And they will get as many hits as they can stand."

The project has been driven by federal grants. In 2001, the Marriott library received the first grant for $93,000 in Library Services and Technology Act federal funds. Matched by Marriott library funds, it allowed for digitizing of three newspapers — The Vernal Express, The Grand Valley Times and The Wasatch Wave — a project totaling about 30,000 pages.

Those papers were picked by the director of the library's special collections because they are in three different regions of the state and still exist today. They were available online late last year.

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